Treaty of Aquatic and Island Boundaries (1914)

Historical document – Context for the trilogy

The Treaty of Aquatic and Island Boundaries between Costa Rica and Panama, signed in 1914, sought to definitively resolve the maritime and island zones inherited from the dissolution of the Central American Federation and the territorial succession of the former Captaincy General of Guatemala. Although presented as a technical bilateral agreement, its background reveals much about the way in which Costa Rica articulated—and omitted—key elements of its own territorial memory during the transition from the 19th to the 20th century.

This treaty attempted to establish clear coordinates on the maritime sovereignty of the Pacific and the Caribbean, incorporating definitions of islands, archipelagos, and strategic marine spaces. However, its negotiation took place in a context where Costa Rica was already carrying a fundamental omission within its own territorial narrative:
the absence of the Transit Campaign (1856–1857) and the role of Major Máximo Blanco Rodríguez as a determining geopolitical factor in the defense of the San Juan River border.

During the 19th century, the region experienced an accelerated diplomatic rearrangement, where boundary treaties depended as much on legal arguments as on the strength of the historical narrative that each nation could demonstrate. Costa Rica, having militarily neutralized the filibusters in the San Juan and captured the steamers that controlled the interoceanic route, possessed an exceptional historical basis to consolidate its sovereign position. But that capital—military, strategic, and moral—was silenced in the national narrative.

When Costa Rica negotiated the 1914 treaty with Panama, it did so without resorting to that historical foundation, adopting a moderate, technical stance detached from the tradition of territorial defense built by the Vanguard Column a century earlier. In that narrative vacuum—also fueled during the Second Republic—Costa Rica consolidated treaties where the strategic memory of the San Juan did not play the role it legally could have.

For the trilogy Las Aguas del Olvido, the 1914 Treaty shows a historical constant:
Costa Rica’s territorial decisions are developed without fully integrating the fluvial, military, and geopolitical dimension of the Transit Campaign, creating an argumentative deficit that later reappears in other disputes, such as those resolved by the International Court of Justice in The Hague in the 21st century.

In sum, the 1914 treaty is a key point to understand the progressive emptying of Costa Rican strategic memory, a process that this trilogy aims to recover, document and reinterpret.

→ Download PDF of the Treaty of Aquatic and Island Boundaries (1914)

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